As Banff Centre’s dance program The Creative Gesture moves into its third summer season, many ask where the experimental program has been going. The answer, clearly, is somewhere very exciting and cutting edge.

Under the guidance of Ballet BC artistic director Emily Molnar, the conversation has taken up a unitary theme of great interest: how do you get dancers and choreographers to take a greater role in scaffolding a new ballet as it develops throughout the creative process?

Enter Alan Lucien Øyen and his new work The Hamlet Complex, a testing ground template for a very different way to create contemporary dance theatre at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The Norwegian choreographer in summer residence gave only a few guidelines to his four actors and 12 dancers, asking them to reflect on their own experiences regarding the play’s sedimented themes of death, loss, love, memory and falsehood, but above all, how actors and people in real life tend to play-act through their lives, as though they were part of a play.

The result is a keenly felt series of personalized tropes on the Hamlet story.

“The Hamlet Complex is therefore very much the work of the dancers and actors involved. It’s their own ideas, movements and stories they act out on stage,” Øyen states.

While Øyen writes most of the premises behind the choreographic panels we see, the co-operation between dancers and artistic director builds and scaffolds the dance as a whole, a much more European approach to creating an art work.

“This is the nature of how I choose to work — letting the conversations between the performers and myself dictate the result you see on stage.”

The Hamlet Complex at Banff Centre. Courtesy Don LeeCalgary

If the final rehearsals many of us have seen are any indicator, The Hamlet Complex is shaping up to be a provocative, edgy and relevant ballet for our time.

And Øyen explores more still, peering into Shakespeare’s masterpiece exploration of reality itself, and whether reality is more a prison, much like how Hamlet sees Denmark, versus something we have just made up ourselves. Øyen interweaves this central question with art and the stage.

“I am always looking for the current contradiction between fiction and reality. How reality comes into contact with fiction on stage, or how the “reality” of the stage comments on our increasingly fictitious world.”

Molnar’s program The Creative Gesture fosters the artistic environment needed to create The Hamlet Complex. With 12 dancers, four actors, two of whom were selected from Yale’s graduate drama program, and an international production team, the production stands in part as an outgrowth of Molnar’s carefully curated program and its recently developed, unique series of side-by-side interdisciplinary workshops.

The Creative Gesture now features composition labs with seven composers who can dance their own improvised creations and develop them each day thereafter in the weeklong workshop. Equally important is the addition of dramaturgy, directed by the well-known Akram Khan dramaturg Ruth Little, which puts the program in a good position for interacting with the multiple creative facets found in dance, including composition, choreography, improvisation, lighting, costuming, creative concept, with much more to be added in the future.

Effectively, in the past two years, Banff’s dance program has become successfully immersive. Its participants can intersect in new ways, directly interacting with more production elements as an art work unfolds, whether their own or something like The Hamlet Complex or last year’s highly successful ballet Noetic. And that makes Banff unique for this kind of movement-art creativity.

“In this way, we can complement formal design with improvised work. We can better blend chaos with creativity,” Molnar says. And this brings The Creative Gesture toward one of its cherished goals — using only a few formal guidelines while challenging dancers to be more like contemporary artists who create and perform the artwork co-operatively at all levels.

The program has grown and now numbers an impressive 68 participants, half of whom are Canadian, with several from Alberta. That means there is always opportunity for constant showing and continual feedback. The remaining participants originate from Brazil, Taiwan, Norway, Israel, Italy, South Africa, and the U.K.

The Hamlet Complex is only three weeks in the making and one which constitutes a kind of “research” dance piece 90 minutes in length. Nonetheless, the hothouse crucible creation is off to an interesting start and has already yielded multiple artistic benefits.

The production will grow into a second, expanded three-act version for the coming season with The Norwegian Opera and Ballet, complete with a bigger set and full orchestra. Eventually, these two versions will comprise a third touring version for Øyen’s fast-growing company, called winter guests, later next fall.

Performances of The Hamlet Complex run at Banff Centre Thursday through Saturday.